第80章

THE OTHER MAN'S MIGHT.

At eleven o'clock on Monday morning James, head of the Fanning-Smith family, president of Fanning-Smith and Company, and chairman of the Great Lakes and Gulf railway--to note his chief titles to eminence up-town and down--was seated in his grandfather's office, in his grandfather's chair, at his grandfather's desk.Above his head hung his grandfather's portrait; and he was a slightly modernized reproduction of it.

As he was thus in every outward essential his grandfather over again, he and his family and the social and business world assumed that he was the reincarnation of the crafty old fox who first saw the light of day through the chinks in a farm-hand's cottage in Maine and last saw it as it sifted through the real-lace curtains of his gorgeous bedroom in his great Madison Avenue mansion.But in fact James was only physically and titularly the representative of his grandfather.Actually he was typical of the present generation of Fanning-Smiths--a self-intoxicated, stupid and pretentious generation; a polo-playing and racing and hunting, a yachting and palace-dwelling and money-scattering generation; a business-despising and business-neglecting, an old-world aristocracy-imitating generation.He moved pompously through his two worlds, fashion and business, deceiving himself completely, every one else except his wife more or less, her not at all--but that was the one secret she kept.

James was the husband of Herron's daughter by his first wife, and Herron had induced him to finance the syndicate that had raided and captured National Woolens.

James was bred to conservatism.His timidity was of that wholesome strength which so often saves chuckle-heads from the legitimate consequences of their vanity and folly.But the spectacle of huge fortunes, risen overnight before the wands of financial magicians whose abilities he despised when he compared them with his own, was too much for timidity.He had been born with a large vanity, and it had been stuffed from his babyhood by all around him until it was become as abnormal as the liver of a Strasburg goose--and as supersensitive.It suffered acutely as these Jacks went climbing up their bean-stalk wealth to heights of magnificence from which the establishments and equipages of the Fanning-Smiths must seem poor to shabbiness.He sneered at them as "vulgar new-comers"; he professed abhorrence of their ostentation.But he--and Gertrude, his wife--envied them, talked of them constantly, longed to imitate, to surpass them.

In the fullness of time his temptation came.He shivered, shrank, leaped headlong--his wife pushing.

About ten days before the raid on National Woolens there had drifted in to Dumont through one of his many subterranean sources of information a rumor that the Fanning-Smiths had stealthily reduced their holdings of Great Lakes to twenty-one thousand shares and that the property was not so good as it had once been.

He never permitted any Wall Street development to pass unexplained--he thought it simple prudence for a man with the care of a great financial and commercial enterprise to look into every dark corner of the Street and see what was hatching there.

Accordingly, he sent an inquiry back along his secret avenue.

Soon he learned that Great Lakes was sound, but the Fanning-Smiths had gone rotten; that they were gambling in the stock of the road they controlled and were supposed in large part to own; that they were secretly selling its stock "short"--that is, were betting it would go down--when there was nothing in the condition of the property to justify a fall.He reflected on this situation and reached these conclusions: "James Fanning-Smith purposes to pass the autumn dividend, which will cause the stock to drop.Then he will take his profits from the shares he has sold short and will buy back control at the low price.He is a fool and a knave.Only an imbecile would thus trifle with an established property.A chance for some one to make a fortune and win a railroad by smashing the Fanning-Smiths." Having recorded in his indelible memory these facts and conclusions as to James Fanning-Smith's plunge from business into gambling, Dumont returned to his own exacting affairs.

He had himself begun the race for multi-millions as a gambler and had only recently become ALMOST altogether a business man.But he thought there was a radical difference between his case and Fanning-Smith's.To use courageous gambling as means to a foothold in business--he regarded that as wise audacity.To use a firm-established foothold in business as a means to gambling--he regarded that as the acme of reckless folly.

Besides, when he marked the cards or loaded the dice for a great Wall Street game of "high finance," he did it with skill and intelligence; and Fanning-Smith had neither.

When the banking-house of Fanning-Smith and Company undertook to finance the raid on National Woolens it was already deep in the Great Lakes gamble.James was new to Wall Street's green table;and he liked the sensations and felt that his swindle on other gamblers and the public--he did not call it by that homely name, though he knew others would if they found him out--was moving smoothly.Still very, very deep down his self-confidence was underlaid with quicksand.But Herron was adroit and convincing to the degree attainable only by those who deceive themselves before trying to deceive others; and James' cupidity and conceit were enormous.He ended by persuading himself that his house, directed and protected by his invincible self, could carry with ease the burden of both loads.Indeed, the Great Lakes gamble now seemed to him a negligible trifle in the comparison--what were its profits of a few hundred thousands beside the millions that would surely be his when the great Woolens Monopoly, bought in for a small fraction of its value, should be controlled by a group of which he would be the dominant personality?